Wednesday, 31 January 2018

Problem: My client is looking for a simple tool to monitor a website is up and running and can run a small set of UI tests and asserts to verify it is working as expected.

Initial Hypothesis: There are a lot of monitoring sites like uptime that meet this requirement, but I reviewed Ghost Inspector and endtest. I am not looking to do full CI as I would look at Selenium WebDriver for an enterprise solution for UI testing.

Resolution: Trial endtest and Ghost inspector on my O365 subscription to validate it monitors and alerts, can perform advanced logins and it can validate custom pages after JavaScript injection. Price and feature wise both tools are pretty similar.

Ghost Inspector Initial Thoughts
Easy to use and there is a recording function for Chrome. This review has put me off Ghost Inspector to some degree but definitely an excellent product to evaluate.Bad review for Ghost Inspector but it does assume enterprise level UI testing more suited to tooling like Selenium.

endtest Initial Thoughts
Easy to use, setup testing in a matter of minutes, recorded actions and assertions. The trial is limited as I could not check the scheduling mechanism, but end test looks like the ideal tool for my requirement. Would need to go for the pro licence at $79 per month. A simpler smaller option would be more attractive but let's see what the client thinks.

Other Tools for UI Testing:Selenium
Selenium IDE is an excellent tool for UI testing and UI automation testing. Here is a post on Selenium I did a few years back.qTest Explorer
This is a Manual recording and documentation tool that records browser and desktop interaction. It's straightforward to use and great for Manual UI testing. It is not for automation or re-running test but great if the project requires manual testing and proof.